It took almost two years, but the American public is starting to glimpse beneath the cracked veneer of President Obama. Once we get past his pretense of moderation, his abundance of contrived charm, and his pre-formulated intellectual largesse, we see him and his administration as they really are: a legion of crony capitalists who create, shape, and exploit financial crises, a sordid collection of has-been Marxists turned policy wonks, and an ill-prepared captain who finds his copy of Rules for Radicals 1 sorely lacking guidance as the U.S.S. Economy sinks further into debt, despair, and degradation.
But since our fearless leader seems so inured of the philosophical underpinnings of the Marx-Trotsky-Lenin triad, perhaps we could learn something from how Russia once (and possibly still does) handled their propaganda, which was their most potent weapon of mass destruction. According to Anatoly Golitsyn, a former high-level KGB officer who defected to the United Sates in 1961 and author of the book “New Lies for Old,” 2 communism and its adherents used two major patterns of disinformation to dupe the West and control the masses in communist societies. Obama uses these strategies with unmatched precision and cunning.
The first pattern, known as “Weakness and Evolution” uses “calculated ideological moderation” to calm adversaries by understating its ideological tendencies while simultaneously confounding opposition by masking the true intentions of its policies. The unwitting public, caught up in the maelstrom of a carefully crafted media images and sound bites, loses its critical capacity and buys the slogan, seemingly oblivious of the nefarious product lurking beneath.
Thus, we have an administration that claims to be moderate at heart, a proponent of the free market, a trumpeter of transparency, and an advocate of the little people, whilst it concurrently employs and consults with radicals, empowers wall-street “fat-cats,” coerces opposition and cuts backroom deals, and stifles dissent through ad-hominem attacks and charges of racism.
The supposed “weakness,” that Obama’s radical upbringing had been tempered by his love for democracy and newfound regard for capitalism, was to be the foundation for his “evolution,” his emigration toward traditional American values. Both proved to be a clever front, but not clever enough. “Hope and change” morphed into “dope and rearrange.” Yet the American electorate is waking up from its stupor and does not like what it sees, because unlike the Soviets, we don’t need government to validate our views our champion our change; most of us just want them to leave us the hell alone.
To say that Obama specifically, and the Democrats in general, are in crisis, is an understatement. As Obama’s inner circle is sacked, resigns, or finds other career paths, Americans of all stripes are losing faith. But, much like Russian communist regimes, an inner crisis necessitates a strategic change in order to better manage impressions and woo the waning support of voters and potential voters.
So, undeterred, Obama relentlessly presses on, this time using the second pattern of disinformation: “Façade and Strength.” According to Golitsyn, when a “regime is in a state of crisis, if the regime is weak, if its leadership is split or compromised, the logical pattern of disinformation is to conceal the crisis and its dimensions, to attract attention to other areas and problems.”
This portends to the forward trajectory of the Obama administration. Faced with a feckless economic policy, unprecedented debt, and the specter of a savage rollback of his Democrat base in November, Obama has resorted suppressing information that is damaging and exaggerating data that is favorable. This is why information about the scope of damage caused by the BP oil
spill 3 was actively suppressed by the Obama administration. In a similar vein, Obama has targeted Fox News, creating an enemies list that is beginning to rival that of Richard Nixon.
President Obama’s latest tirade against the Chamber of Commerce is a perfect example of the Façade and Strength strategy; what it lacked in fact and substance it made up in hyperbole and hypocrisy. While Obama points the finger of duplicity at the Chamber, his administration neglects to mention how little scrutiny was involved in the contributions his campaign
received. 4 Nor did he ever explain why he broke his promise to remain under public financing. In typical Obama subterfuge, he rails against Republicans for being in the pocket of special interest as he whitewashes the fact that the auto bailouts were little more than payola for the United Auto Workers Union.
In a parallel and grandiose fashion, Obama continues to declare our economy, teetering on the edge of a full-blown depression, to be success story, claiming his stimulus package to have ‘brought us back from the brink of disaster.” Even as we watch the unemployment rate hover near 10%, as houses are foreclosed on at an appalling rate, and more Americans are in poverty than the past 60 years, he only superficially acknowledges this grimness.
Instead, he warns the American public things would have been “far worse” were it not for the swift and decisive action to print and distribute $787 billion in order to appease unions, buy off future votes, and saddle future generations with an onerous debt and ultimately, inflation. Obama’s message for the new millennium: “When the going get’s tough, blame the Republicans, the Tea Party, Wall Street, fill in the blank...” Unfortunately for the President, Americans want jobs and opportunity, not finger pointing and scapegoating.
And even as companies such as McDonalds, Boeing, and Lockheed react negatively against the hastily and poorly crafted health-care legislation, as premiums skyrocket and doctors drop out of Medicare, as a large swath of the American heartland expresses dissatisfaction with Obamacare, our President heralds the Affordable Care Act a triumph for the American public. It is not the case that Obama is “disconnected” from the populace; the ugly reality is that he is engaged in a systemic campaign of disinformation. As Golitsyn points out, “Propaganda plays a leading role to the extent that it becomes in itself the main form of disinformation.” Much like the famous Marshall McLuhan 5 quote, “the medium is the message,” Obama has fashioned a new aphorism appropriately fitting for his regime: “the lie is the truth,” if only we repeat it often enough.
1. http://theunionnews.blogspot.com/2008/10/summary-of-saul-alinskys-rules-for.html
2. http://www.amazon.com/New-Lies-Old-Anatoliy-Golitsyn/dp/0945001134
3. http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/10/07/2526821/report-white-house-suppressed.html
4. http://www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/obama-s-weekend-tirade-accusations-create-political-firestorm
5. http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/main.html
